Bye Bye Birdie

Several months ago (before school ended), we started hearing strange scratching sounds around the house. Admittedly, it freaked Addysen out more than once when she was home alone.
We finally figured it must be a bird's nest -- although, after checking the gutters, we couldn't find where it was.
Until...
One day while on the front porch, I watched a bird fly out of the vent on the front of the house.
Mystery solved. Sort of.

 Although the scratching became highly irritating and annoying, we figured we would just let the birds do their thing until the babies were grown and then we'd figure out how to eliminate the nest.
Now fast forward (or is it rewind since this actually happened last week?)
The smell in our main floor bathroom got really bad. It's not a large bathroom and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why it still smelled after I cleaned it - -and cleaned it -- and cleaned it.
And then, I figured it out. (Yes, I am a little slow, perhaps.)
It was the bird's nest. In the vent....right over the bathroom. The reason the scratching was so loud in the office and bathroom was that a nice little family of birds was constantly traipsing back and forth through the vent...and making my house smell like a pet store in the process.
We simply couldn't let those birds do their thang any longer.
If you've ever been around a Kerr of the male gender -- you know they are men of SOLUTIONS. Granted, their solutions might not always be the most... how shall we say it? pragmatic? Sanitary? Safe? (I could go on but for the sake of family relationships, I won't.) But hey, they come up with solutions.
(Sidenote: I'm remembering a certain Christmas Eve many years ago when the Kerr Patriarch needed a Christmas Tree. He simply took the chain saw out to the front yard and chopped down one of his pine trees, brought it into the living room, trimmed it with the chain saw and WALAH! A Christmas tree was born.)
But back to the birds.
Greg did what any quick-thinking man would do when encountering a nasty smell and unwelcome house-guests.
He took off the vent in the bathroom, fired up the leaf blower -- and BLEW.

 Cannon and I watched from the front porch in morbid fascination as an entire family of birds shot out of the vent....followed by feathers and twigs and the remains of their family home.

 It was actually quite heart-breaking to see the little babies fall to the ground. (Of course, in our defense, we didn't know the actual maturity of the birds - -only that they were loud and extremely smelly.)

 Cannon was so distraught that he came in the house and researched some sort of animal shelter that would be interested in rescuing the birds that had literally been blown from their home. Unfortunately, he didn't come up with any viable results. And sadly, I've since found a few dead bodies in the bushes.

The death of the birds makes me sad. The death of the smell, however, does not.
Needless to say, as soon as he had the vent cover back on in the bathroom, Greg climbed the ladder and secured the vent to prevent future inhabitants.